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Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

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Yesterday I wrote a post saying I was giving up. But I woke up this morning with renewed motivation and worked hard to finish something. I’ll admit it is not much, just a simple racer but it is better than failing to submit something a second time in a row.

I give up. There is no way I can finish within the time that is left. I guess I was both too ambitious and not competent enough. I wanted too do a post-apocalyptic racer in which minigames would pop-up every 10 seconds but I could barely manage a playable racer even though I had plenty of time this week-end. I’m especially disappointed since this is my second LudumDare in a row for which I couldn’t deliver.

Enough with self pity. Here is a screen shot and short demos of the racer.

That’s what I planed to call it but family matters decided otherwise. Compo is over for me, I’ll never have the time to finish. Seriously, someone should come up with a “occupation-for-wife-or-girlfriend-during-ludum-dare”-dare.

Anyways, my game was to be a bullet hell style shooter without a shooting button mixed with a block puzzle. Basically, bullets have color. When you’re hit, you accumulate charge. If the next hit is from a bullet of a different color, you fire and start charging the new color and so on. The goal is to accumulate as much as possible charge of one color to destroy incoming blocks. Not very clear, isn’t it… Here is a screen shot. You can also try the latest builds here : Mac / Win / Linux

Good luck to those still fighting through the final stretch and congratulations to all who already posted their contributions ! Can’t wait to give them a try !

You want to be evil and the Evil Master of the Evil Clan
looks at you but at the same time he looks at the beautiful
waves behind you and deeply smells the salty scent of
the infinite sea. After a long pause he says :

Hi to everybody. Here is my post mortem for The Princess Digs Zombies, the game I made for the October Challenge 2012.

First, the result : I failed… I finished and submitted the game on Kongregate about 10 days before the end of the challenge but didn’t manage to make a dollar. On November 1, I was at $0.51 in revenue.

What went wrong :

– I completely underestimated ( again ) the time I needed to finish the game.

– I was so worried of not having enough time to make money on Kongregate that I published too early and didn’t play test the game enough. I missed a huge design flaw that was of course immediately spotted by players. From that moment the game never got better review than 2 stars ( and rightly so ) and could therefore never attract enough people.

– design flaw : I was so obsessed about how I wanted the game to be played that I could never imagine that their would be other ways to play it. There was : just push up and you can beat the game in no time, not even looking at the screen. So the problem was not only that I didn’t take enough time to play test the game, but I should also have had it tested by others

What went well :

– I had fun !

– I finished something in time and submitted it !

– I made not only 1 but 2 products ! There is the game of course but I am now also selling the ASCII console tool I developed for it on the Unity Asset Store. Look for TrueColor CP437 in the Asset Store if you are interested in it. Or checke the web page.

Well, if you went that far, thank you for reading. Congrats to everybody who participated. See you for the next miniLD !

My entry for the October Challenge is called The Princess Digs Zombies. I originally started this game for the MiniLD #34 which theme was “dare”. I love RTS games but suck at them so I dared to mix a RTS game and a Tetris / Columns game. I couldn’t finish in time but I felt I had to get back to it somehow. The October Challenge was the perfect incentive.

The game is developed with Unity. So far, I have rewritten the whole game from javascript to c# and strongly rationalized gameplay which made programming so much easier. In the process, I am also testing my handcrafted ASCII console package ( which I plan to release on the Unity asset store later, but I guess middleware is an alternate way to monetize your game ).

I’d say the game is 90% finished when it comes to code, graphics and story. I plan to spend the end of the week balancing units and maybe adding a final boss : the Zombie Lord himself ! My plan is therefore to release the game on Kongregate by next monday. I have no idea if I can make a dollar within the 10 days or so remaining.

What I’d love to do is to add an iOS version with a two players mode but I’m also not sure I can do that within the time I’ll have left…

As usual, I am amazed at what some other contestants have already manage to pull out. Congrats.

An unknown Shadow Agent has implented K-pop augmented kittens in every Zombie Scientists from the Center Brain of Planet Mars. As a result all mega-neural-computers of said Scientists have started manufacturing a new weapon of mass destruction : the Random Evolution Bomb. These devices, dropped on our planet, randomize evolution of all animals within their range, effectively creating monstruous hybrids.

Of course, your hot girlfriend is the key to saving the world : here genetic code holds the identity of the shadow agent and the map to the Zombie Scientists weapon factories is tatooed somewhere on her body. Cut through the army of randomly evolved monsters and reach her to save the world !

Good luck.Kisses.

So, that’s it. Each level is a random map, with an increasing number of random bombs dropped on each of them. It generates dangerous hybrids that you have to fight. I have an ASCII console working in Unity ( should have made it before hand and published it, I lost 4 hours on that ), random map generation is working and animals are internally defined as a list of body parts I can rearrange at will.

Tomorrow I’ll start working on the combat system. I still don’t know if I’ll try a sort of top / down beat them all or a JRPG fighting system. Probably the later, considering the time I have left.